That's especially true in Chicago, where such suspicions, too often, have turned out to be well-founded.

So we're happy to hear that Mayor Rahm Emanuel has given up the battle to keep those investigations secret. Courts had ruled — twice — that records of police misconduct complaints are public under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. But the city had vowed to appeal to the state Supreme Court.

Instead, it will release the records sought by journalist Jamie Kalven in a case dating to 2007. Going forward, the city says, its policy will be to hand over such documents without a fight.

We don't want to get carried away here. What the city has said is that it will comply with the open records law. We're confident the Supreme Court would have ordered it to do so.

But when it comes to fulfilling public records requests, the default response of too many public bodies is to stall, or to reject the requests outright. What follows is a lengthy, frustrating and often expensive appeals process, assuming the requester wants the documents badly enough. In Kalven's case, it took more than seven years.

That sent a terrible message to the public. Emanuel's team came to understand that.

"By allowing access to these records, the Chicago Police Department will further demonstrate that it takes allegations of police misconduct seriously," police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said in the city's written statement.

The records sought by Kalven include investigative files on five officers accused of physical and sexual abuse of Diane Bond, a public housing tenant, along with so-called "repeater lists," which name officers who are the subject of multiple complaints.

An analysis of police data done by University of Chicago law professor Craig Futterman, who represented Bond, showed that citizens' abuse complaints against Chicago police officers between 2002 and 2004 were sustained only about 1 percent of the time, far less often than in other major metro departments. Futterman also found that the department made little effort to identify officers who were the subject of multiple complaints.

A similar head-in-the-sand attitude was to blame for decades of systematic torture of criminal defendants at the hands of former police Cmdr. Jon Burge, who was finally fired in 1993. As recently as December 2012, a federal jury found that a "code of silence" protects rogue cops in the Chicago Police Department.

The belief that police officers won't be held accountable for misconduct undermines public confidence in the department. It's a huge problem in the city's most violent neighborhoods, where too many residents are wary of the officers who are assigned to protect them.

That lack of trust is far more damaging than whatever is in those files.

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